Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (17 page)

“Ma’am, that rumor is just not true.”

I saw Karen straighten up, turn, and begin pushing her way up the aisle, toward the exit.

Is she leaving? Why would she
—

Karen suddenly stopped and doubled over, coughing.

Oh no. Nononononono!!!

I’d missed a question. The speaker was the clerk at the liquor shack by the airport, a spare, serious young man with dark-framed glasses and a wisp of scraggly beard. “Why can’t you use all the vaccine you have on kids and elders!”

Karen straightened, caught her breath, went out.

People nodded at the question. But the answer—if I voiced it—would trigger an explosion.
It’s worse than you think. There aren’t enough doses for all of you in the whole country
.
The best we could do was to fly in a lousy one hundred and twelve doses. We’re scrounging for more.

God help us if an inoculated person comes down with it.

Merlin suddenly stood beside me. He put his meaty arm over my shoulder, claiming friendship, which was no small thing. He reminded the town that Eddie and I helped save everyone here a year ago, when we stopped an outbreak on a ship offshore. He said that “his friend” Colonel Rush had cooperated with the police from the beginning, that I was the one who had identified the disease in the first place. He told them that without my input, the disease might not have been identified at all.

The screaming subsided to a low, angry rumble. Merlin and I moved offstage, surrendering the limelight back to Wayne Homza. The general squeezed my shoulder and nodded at me as we passed, playing to the crowd. His crisp uniform smelled of pipe tobacco, and close up, his eyes were neutral, light gray, and intelligent. “Stay here till the meeting is over. Research center. One hour.”

The audience had calmed a trifle, but that trifle made a difference. Homza began answering questions again.

“I saved your ass there, Joe,” Merlin said.

“I know.”
Where’s Karen?

“Tell me now, Joe. Push comes to shove, can I depend on you? If I can’t, I don’t want you near me. I don’t want you fucking my investigation. You’re in the middle. I get it. But don’t lie to me again.”

In the pause before I replied, I flashed to the prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, where Eddie and I had once interviewed a U.S. Army private—Horace L. Scruggs—disgruntled kid from Tampa—a pimply beanpole with a low IQ, sentenced to forty years for sending anthrax through the mail to the vice president. I saw the kid’s cramped cell, his moist, concrete world. I heard the echoing bootfalls outside, a drum that never stopped. I smelled steamed beef and Lysol and a rank, perpetual chill, alive as memory. In Leavenworth, time is geology. The institution is a steel casket for people who remain alive.

Screw around with me, I’ll put you in Leavenworth,
Wayne Homza had said.

“I promise,” I said.

I thought,
Why did I say that?

•   •   •

THE LAST QUESTION CAME FROM A HALF-BENT ELDER SUPPORTING HIMSELF
with palsied hands on the shoulders of a teenage girl, granddaughter, probably. A sickle-shaped, white-haired man in a white anorak. His voice wavered but he not was not weak, mentally. He’d seen trucks passing the old folks’ home, slatted ones filled with children, he said, because their small pink hands had been visible, fingers on wood, little pink fingers in the cold.

“What are you doing with these children?”

The stunned audience fell silent. Perhaps elsewhere they would have discounted the question. But this man had been a respected community leader. He was not senile. I saw that many people here were prepared to believe that the Rangers would have actually been transporting innocent children into a disease area. It did not bode well.

Homza answered smoothly. “Yes, sir. Trucks. But those were not children inside, but monkeys we’ve brought for lab purposes. Our doctors will be working round the clock to defeat the sickness. These creatures will help.”

He was interrupted by the strident, British-accented voice of Tilda Swann. “Torturing innocent animals!”

It was so irrelevant that it killed some tension, even made one person laugh out loud. The meeting ended. The crowd headed for the exits, talking loudly, a mix of rage, fear, hope, argument. At least, for the moment, dispersing.

Outside, a parking lot, as in any high school. Cars and SUVs lined up at exits, orderly, taking families home, as if they were leaving a basketball game, a PTA meeting.

I kept remembering Karen, coughing. I needed to know where she was. My heart pounded with fear for her. I pulled out my cell phone but the jammers stopped it from working. There was a landline inside the school, in the office. Long distance calls were out but maybe local lines functioned. I could try the base. Or the hospital, where I hoped she had not gone.

But will there even be anyone at the base, or are they gas bombing the place, disinfecting?

The hallways were deserted. I heard my boots echo as I hurried toward the office. I was so worried about Karen that my defensive instincts weren’t working. I only heard the other footfalls, the running ones, at the last minute.

I whirled. It was one of Homza’s Rangers, a guard who’d stood beneath the stage while he spoke. Hispanic guy. I relaxed, but tensed up when I saw his eyes. He was wary of me.

“The general said to get you, sir. Now.”

“After I make a quick call, Sergeant. One minute.”

“The general said you are to come immediately. The general said if you resist, to restrain you, sir.”

“What . . .
restrain me
?”

“Please come along. Now.”

The phone inside that glass office was only ten feet away. I wanted to make sure she was all right. But a second Ranger appeared. It was clear that only one course of action would be permitted. The first guy had his hand on his sidearm. No phone call for me, not now. I went with them, praying inwardly,
Let her not be sick.

Karen Vleska was getting puzzled, sitting in the passenger seat of the late-model Subaru Outback, bumping out of the main part of town, off the grid of gravel streets, onto side roads crossing onto tundra. The Subaru headed south, toward the gas pipeline and pump building and the lines raised above the permafrost. Everything she saw was inside the wire perimeter that the Rangers were setting up.

I hope that Alice Aghokeak isn’t sick with rabies, like Bruce said!

A few sporadic homes here, maybe one every half mile, in Barrow’s outlying area. One-story shacks with lots of space between them. The Subaru had good snow tires and she heard the crunch of gravel and crushed snow.

“Bruce, why is she here?”

“She lives out here, has a little house.”

At the wheel, Dr. Bruce Friday hunched forward, in the posture of a perpetually bad driver, but as usual, although he looked incompetent, he fared well. Both gloved hands gripped the weathered wheel. His battered vehicle had served him for years, and smelled of blooded meat and preservative chemicals and ketchup and cheap cold cuts.

The radio—which normally worked—was out, a victim of Ranger jammers.

With basically the entire town at the high school, they passed no other vehicles. The sky was overcast, typical for autumn, with a seasonal blanket of gray fog. Bruce seemed nervous, but considering what he’d said while convincing her to come here with him, that made sense.

“Alice said she was sick. She hates hospitals. She said you’ve been nice to her. She’ll only talk to you.”

“Symptoms, Bruce?”

“She can’t feel her hands. I couldn’t get her to go to the doctor!”

“You should have made her go.”

“How? Ha! She’s 180 pounds, and she’s mad.”

“My God. Does she have fever?”

“Yes. High fever.”

“How does she sound?”

“Sound?” He seemed to think about it. “She made—at first I thought she was coughing—grunting noises.”

“Joe has a theory that it may not even be contagious.”

“That’s crazy! Then how could it be spreading?” Friday said. He sounded almost offended by Joe’s idea.

“That’s what I said.”

Back at the school, Karen had suddenly felt nauseous during Joe’s speech. It was probably her period coming on, dizziness, bad cramps as always, so she’d headed out toward the bathroom, run into Bruce in the deserted hall. He’d hurried her out of there after the dizziness passed. She’d seen no one else in the parking lot. “Alice Aghokeak’s running a 102 fever,” he’d said.

“Why ask for me, Bruce?”

“People trust you.”

“Let’s find Ranjay, take him, too.”

“Ranjay’s busy at the hospital.”

“You’re a good person, Bruce,” Karen said now.

She picked up her cell phone to call Joe, let him know where she was, and then remembered that the jammers would block communication. She’d tell Joe later. She’d seen Joe freeze onstage when she started coughing. He’d be worried. He’d think she was ill. But he’d understand why she had to leave. Bruce’s urgency was infectious. Something off with the whole scene but with all the craziness, there was no time to analyze that. Some fraction of her mind thinking,
Why had Bruce been with Alice to start with, and not at the high school with everyone else?

Karen remembered Alice from the Barrow dance group: a lightbulb-shaped, forty-year-old, overweight woman who never stopped shoving Sailor Boy Pilot Bread into her mouth during breaks. And yet, on the floor, with twenty hand drums beating, with her thick, fur dance mitts on, she looked so feminine, a flower stalk in wind, a young girl, a virginal presence in the “Newlywed Dance.”

The road dipped slightly, passed into a shallow tundra bowl. She could no longer see the town or the specks of soldiers a half mile off. Ever since Calvin DeRochers had told her about diamond finds and meteor strikes, she saw tundra lakes and depressions in a different way; wondered if embedded in the permafrost down there was, as Calvin insisted, a fortune find rivaling South Africa’s or Arctic Canada’s in wealth.

Calvin was always going on about meteors, slamming into Earth eons ago. The impacts like an infusion of microbes. Vaccination from space. Microbes that could alter rock. It would be funny if he was right, she thought. It would be
fair
for the driven Arkansas man to emerge from the Arctic as a gem millionaire. For a moment she flashed to Calvin. His charts. His talks. His theories. Calvin going on about the vast tundra here
seeming
as unimportant to the rest of the U.S. as, say, Saudi Arabia was in 1900. A wasteland. An icebox. But Karen knew from briefings and after her short time in the High North that the world was pivoting here. All the upcoming war games, the oil, the planning, all of Joe’s frustration went to that fact.

She went back to what Joe had said this morning, after his nightmare.
What if all this sickness somehow goes back to someone trying to stop the Harmon project?

Bruce Friday slid the Outback to a halt beside the north side of a dilapidated one-story wooden house, completely cutting off her view of the soldiers. No smoke rose from the pipe chimney. The roof canted sideways. The walls seemed sucked in and the
cunnychuck
door, the outer entrance to the house, was secured by a clothesline strung between the knob hole and the shadows inside.

“Bruce, there’s no truck or snowmobile here. Maybe Alice left.”

“Her son dropped her off here. She’s inside, all right.”

There were no footprints in the snow, either, she thought walking toward the frigid-looking building, but then again, the sandlike snow was so granular that the slightest breeze shifted it and covered up footsteps in a minute. Still, no dog tracks. No caribou hides strung in the backyard. No hunting equipment. Nothing usable in view.

“Looks deserted, Bruce.”

“She’ll freeze in there. Hurry.”

She followed Bruce through the
cunnychuck
and into the living room. She stopped dead, her logical side needing a moment to catch up with her expectations of what she was supposed to see. The place was deserted. It
smelled
long deserted. It smelled like it had not been heated in months. Like even ghosts had left. There was no furniture. Karen called out, “Alice?” as if some voice might answer and dispel reality. Karen turned and saw fresh red paint dripping down a living room wall.

MURDERER MARINES!

YOU KILL OUR LOVED ONES! NOW WE KILL YOURS!

She was so taken aback that she froze, said, “Bruce? What?” and only vaguely registered the quick movement behind her as the floor creaked and an arm circled her neck with shocking force, and she was lifted off the ground.

Bruce looking sad and sick, from five feet away.
Who is behind me?
Karen fighting, trying to kick, claw, scream now, but the arm cut off her air. Karen thinking,
Kick a shin or instep. Stomp on that black boot!
Karen feeling something cold pinch the side of her throat, just a touch, and then the itchy cold sensation moved left to right and a hotness flooded her mouth and spread into her throat and the air was filled with reddish spray that fountained onto the scuffed white wall and beaded it and ran down the side like water.

She buckled.

Karen flopping like a fish. Karen clawing at her throat, unable to draw in air. Karen’s elbows hammering on the floor, her boots pistons, working on their own, as the pool around her grew slicker and soaked into cracks in the floor, the old ship timbers transformed into a home, and then losing purpose yet again. Wreckage. Ghosts.

“You,” she said. “Not . . .”

Only seconds had passed. Karen’s life was running out. Bruce bent over her, looking disgusted but also fascinated, as if studying her. And then another face was there, too. Two faces.

Karen Vleska, scientist, explorer, scheduled focus of an upcoming HBO documentary on the opening Arctic, which would now be canceled. Karen dying, but not on an Arctic trek, the way the documentary would have suggested she might.

Her final emotions came wordlessly, as she looked up at the two faces.

Terror.

Surprise.